replanting old and degraded coffee farms in the region (Bureau pour le
Développement de la Production Agricole 1963). A decade or so later, the
farmers found their own way to solve the “coffee crisis” by using the mostly
old and abandoned, generally shaded coffee groves as alternative sites for
planting cocoa, whose price was much more attractive than that of coffee (this
technique had already been mentioned in colonial reports from the Congo in
the 1950s). The common practice was to cut down most of the spontaneous
forest trees that had grown in the abandoned farms, rehabilitate the coffee,
and then plant cocoa seedlings the following years below the coffee shade.
Once these were established, the conversion was completed by cutting down
the coffee trees. The first clear reports of the use of this technique in the Côte
d’Ivoire date from the late 1970s to early 1980s. In the 1980s, thousands of
old and abandoned coffee farms that had effectively turned into secondary
forests were converted into cocoa plantations. At that time, it had become
clear that the forest would not last forever and that cocoa was very difficult to
replant on deforested sites. This could have inspired the farmers to develop a
more permanent cocoa culture on these old plantation sites by keeping some
of the shade trees and spontaneous regrowth, which could later be turned into
secondary forest and then replanted, thereby avoiding the replanting difficul-
ties in the monoculture system. Instead, with the cocoa sector dominated by
recently arrived migrants, increasing population pressure, and an active land
market, the conversion technique, once proven successful, was adopted on a
large scale by migrants, who bought abandoned, forested coffee farms from
the indigenous farmers and transformed them into mostly unshaded cocoa
plantations (Ruf 1981).
The second innovation occurred in the 1990s, when the Baoulé almost
stopped their migrations to the forest zone once there was little forest left for
planting, and replanting proved so difficult. However, young Burkinabé kept
coming in numbers. Hardly surviving in their own country, they accepted to
work at any cost. At that time it became increasingly clear that the future of
cocoa in the Côte d’Ivoire would depend on the smallholders’ ability to con-
trol the invasive shrub Chromolaena odorata,which invaded the plantations
and dominated the fallows generated by forest clearing and cocoa aging (Ruf
1992). In this situation, many Burkinabé bought 1–2 ha of shrub fallows from
indigenous people and replanted them working three times as many hours per
hectare as during the previous forest time. The most successful in replanting
fallows with cocoa were the recently arrived young Burkinabé migrants, who
concentrated their energy on a small area rather than spreading it over a larger
farm, as the indigenous farmers and the migrants who had come earlier did
(Figure 6.4). Almost for the first time in the history of cocoa growing in the
Côte d’Ivoire, thousands of hectares of cocoa were no longer planted after pri-
mary and secondary forests but after shrub fallows (Table 6.2). The farmers
used simple associations of cocoa trees and plantains. Another possibility,
120 II. The Ecological Economics of Agroforestry